Saturday, August 12, 2017

The Google Memo tempest in a teapot.

As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

The Google memo, saying women aren't very into engineering, reached a similar conclusion.

That's the headline. This article is hilarious. I laughed my ass off.

No, the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday morning and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said "What did you do this weekend?"

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: "I built a fiber-channel network in my basement," and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.

At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free.Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.

That is pretty much the entire "Women In STEM" argument in a nutshell. They can do it. But they don't want to. Because it is boring and stupid.

The guys who are good at computer engineering are few and far between. They are rare. Weirdos. Nerds. The kind of dorks that see a computer and can name every chip on the motherboard, know where it came from, who made it, what it does, and a bunch of other boring shit that no sane person would ever care about. They build computers at home. For fun. They enjoy it.

Because they are weirdos.

There ARE women out there like that. I can think of two right off the top of my head, Grace Hopper and the woman that runs Adafruit. So, clearly, they exist.

But here's the other side of the argument. Out of all the women I know or have ever heard of, I can think of two that are as massive computer nerds as men. Two.

That truth puts the guys who fired this kid in a very unflattering light. Women, clearly, are different than men. The Left in general and Google in this particular case are loudly and obnoxiously claiming there is no difference, women and men are the same. Which is self evidently untrue.